[Talk-ca] What do I poutine the name tag of a road with a suffix?

[Pierre-Léo Bourbonnais]

Amazing post, made me laugh! Thanks for this!

In Quebec, most street names are not abbreviated, and I usually correct the few streets with abbreviated prefixes, suffixes and orientations. It is way easier for parsers and analysis tools to detect full prefixes/suffixes and abbreviate them later on than the opposite (for instance: bld, boul, bl, bd, blv are the many boulevard abbreviations I’ve seen so far…)

> On Dec 10, 2022, at 11:49 PM, Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> O Canada,
>
> I'm an American, and for that, I want to apologize in advance. I am told this is the best way to fit in up north. I often edit in Canada. There's a lot to do! After all, there is A LOT of Canada but few Canadians. Imagine my surprise when editing water features in Canada, when I found dozens of copies of Lake Nipissing[1]. Aside from being fun to pronounce, it provided a lovely evening challenge to disentangle the various overlapping Canvec water polygons. Eventually, victory was achieved - Nominatim now reports just one Lake Nipissing[2] in the database! (It turns out I missed a few when I did my big cleanup last year, so I quickly cleaned up the remaining offenders in the minutes just before typing this out. For effect.)
>
> When I launched my big lake cleanup effort last summer, I had to take a big leap of faith and assume that there was no special mapping convention unique to Canada that desired to have their lakes chopped up into a grid of water squares or to have bits of the lake on land where there was no water, or have 27 different water objects with the name "Lake Nipissing". After all, I was a stranger in this foreign land with terms foreign to my American ears like "loonie", "toonie", and "universal health care."
>
> I imagined perhaps that the local Lake Nipissing mapping community held regular, in-person meetings at their favorite hangout, the Twiggs Coffee Roasters in Sturgeon Falls[4], where they sat, gazing over the marina on nearby Sturgeon River, contemplating how it might be mapped from a uniquely Canadian viewpoint. "Squares, eh?" As an American, we didn't study Canada in school, instead understanding that a great ice wall lay beyond our northern border. The bulk of my exposure to Canadian culture, and indeed I can safely say that of most Americans, was the breakout performances of John Candy and Dan Akroyd in the 1995 cult classic film "Canadian Bacon"[5].
>
> Nonetheless, I deleted the loony imported and overlapping water squares and waited for the angry hordes of Canadians to come streaming (virtually) over the border to berate my hamfisted attempts to understand and apply the local culture. Surprisingly, none came.
>
> In the months since, I forgot about my fears of inadvertently tripping over some heretofore unknown aspect of Canadian mapping culture. This ended abruptly last week when I encountered the Great Calgary Road Suffix Fued of 2022:
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/129765303
>
> I was shocked. In Calgary, suffixes on road names are not expanded! Images of "Canadian Bacon" swirled in my head as I wracked my brain to try to remember anything I could about Calgary that might help me understand the cultural factors at play. Sadly, again all I could come up with was another John Candy standard, this time 1993's "Cool Runnings"[6]. Alas, the tales of the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team would shine no light on this dispute. Since pop comedy films turned up no secrets, I fell back to that old standard, the OSM wiki[7][8], to see what it might have to say.
>
> We are at an impasse. The wiki says to expand all abbreviations. I checked a few US examples[9][10] and found them in line with the wiki. The American president (the guy, not the excellent 1995 film starring Michael Douglas) can rest assured that we hold his address accurately as Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest.
>
> So dear reader, if you've read this far, I applaud you, and will happily pick up your tab should we ever find ourselves having coffee together in Sturgeon Falls. I leave this list with a few options they might consider:
>
> 1. Document the unusual tagging habits of the Calgary mapping community. This will help resolve future disputes when mappers can check out the relevant wiki articles and find the helpful words, "however, in Calgary, Canada..." as well as calm the sensibilities of the citizen mappers of this noble city.
> 2. Decide to spell the full road names out in their entirety. This will endlessly confuse those western Canucks, who will surely look quizically at words like "South" and "Northwest", so tread carefully if this is the route you decide to take.
> 3. Politely (is there any other way?) inform those silly foreigners like me that Canada is just too raw, too wild, and too, well, _unusual_ for those beyond its icy borders to map usefully and effectively. Such conventions are no doubt left for locals, and locals alone to possibly understand the nuances of Canadian road naming.
>
> [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Lake_nipissing_errors.png
> [2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Lake%20Nipissing
> [3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/445116840
> [4] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1895040043
> [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDGkQiwh_qg
> [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCmp2qbrZUQ
> [7] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names
> [8] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada/Tagging_guidelines#Street_names
> [9] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/305660797
> [10] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/675221039
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